


Faith/Symptom/Memory

by indiachick



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Angst, Brother Feels, Episode: s11e01 Out of the Darkness Into the Fire, Gen, Hurt Sam Winchester, Non-Linear Narrative, Protective Sam Winchester, Sam finds a Cure, Surreal
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-10-12
Updated: 2015-10-12
Packaged: 2018-04-26 01:07:00
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,913
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4983964
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/indiachick/pseuds/indiachick
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The last time Sam actually counted down hours until probable death, he was in Detroit and the Devil was loose.Or, Sam deals with the events of 11x01. At some points, he doesn't deal.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Faith/Symptom/Memory

The door’s ajar, hospital’s deathly quiet. Sam stands in front of the mirror, not looking in, and considers calling Dean. What would he say, though? _You remember that time when we were stuck in a town with the Croatoan virus running rampant, and a girl bled on me, and nothing happened?_ Well, something happened. This time.

A small part of Sam, somewhere inside of him, is jubilant. The part of Sam that constantly tries to balance himself with a human on the other side of the rickety scales.

So far, so good.

He’s nothing special.

\---

Being infected is like catching a cold: it worsens in stages.

**_First, a cold in the veins where the Darkness encroaches._ **

Numbness. A kind of localized frostbite. He almost doesn’t notice it, but once he does, he keeps thinking about it. Of sludge, of ice. Of the kind of coldness that the human body was not built to comprehend. Fitting—considering how the Darkness was the kind of thing that the human body (or any other kind of body whose ancestors only lived post-Creation) was not built to comprehend.

Sam considers pinching one of those veins to see if any feeling is left, but the idea feels grossly similar to squeezing insect carapaces between fingers and acting surprised when it explodes.

When Sam cut that girl’s neck, the blood that spattered on him was cold. He swallowed some and it tasted foreign, not quite _blood_. Having had prior experience with various taxonomies of blood, Sam thinks he’s discerning enough on the subject for this to warrant concern.

The tiny room enwraps him in its chill protection. Something roams inside his head in increasingly tiny circles.

Once long ago, he’d taken a class in college where someone talked about the terror of the cold, that famous horror story pastiche. He vaguely remembers stories about ships in the Antarctic, bloody battles, creatures from outer space, and dark-skinned natives. _That terrible, visceral fear of the cold and the unknown,_ said the lecturer. Sam reminisced mistily on some long-past hunt: wendigo, Montana, snow. Festoons of intestines, red against white. The sound of Dean’s old, inadequate boots tromping past a tent, the crackle of a fire that wasn’t enough. Cold in his bones. Sam will _know_ cold _,_ later, several thousands of feet under metaphysical ground. But memory is a strange thing, and he remembers this instead.

Uninspiring, insipid, transient: Saturday afternoon class.

 _More like xenophobia,_ Jess had remarked, not to him, leaning back in her seat so that Sam caught, sitting behind her, a sudden giddying waft of flower perfume. There was a pen stuck in her hair, stabbed through. Her fingers were inky, the way they always got when she scribbled her lecture notes.

The afternoon burned hot. He’d craved, in no particular order, ice-cream and beer and salt.

This is memory. The uninspiring, insipid, transient things sometimes compete with the violent, painful, brutalized things. There is subsequent bloodshed.

(Ice-cream, and beer, and salt. It’s cold in here. It’s cold _inside_.)

\---

There are books in the Impala, the chances of which containing any information on the primordial Darkness is astronomically low. (Because, Sam thinks, by now, they have depleted all their _dues ex machinas._ Everything they drop breaks in spectacular, earth-changing fashion.)

Sam’s laptop is somewhere else, forgotten in some other car, left behind when he’d run after his Mark-fatigued brother.

The reception, then, Sam thinks. Internet. Coffee-machine. Stationery. Hopefully less dead bodies, because who would want to sit on an ergonomic chair in a cramped space while the crazies ripped them apart?

There are more of the—they haven’t got a name yet, these _rabid_ (but Sam supposes that’s how new stuff is named: call it something just on the border of usual, and say it long enough that it sticks—unless he’s Dean, and wants to call it something like Jefferson Starships.)— _infected_ outside, slamming into doors, alerted by his presence, but no more malevolent than pet dogs. They come by while Sam browses. They sniff around, angry; all these pestilent kings and queens of this town, Nebraska. He feels their fingers graze his hair, brush his earlobe: gentle and curious.

 _You’re one of us,_ they seem to say. Of the same cloth. Of the same faith. The new faith of the Darkness. For what are the infected but followers of this new faith? If God spawned ecclesiasticism or any other kind of –ism, it only made sense for the Darkness to spawn something, too.

Sam works, furiously. _Fire,_ he jots. _Electricity. The blood of a blasphemer, thrice- boiled in the fourth circle of Hell._ Dean just wants a win. And then he can work his way out through the ravages of the Mark or whatever, he just needs to believe that this _saving people_ thing? That’s something he can do. That’s something he and Sam should be _good_ at. He needs to believe that, and he needs a win to believe that.

Sam can give him a win.

 _The heart of the Holy Cow,_ scribbles Sam _. 1043435035,_ whatever that means.

His fingers shake.

\---

There’s an itch at his neck that Sam hopes isn’t phantom.

He wonders if Dean was really planning on slicing his head off, back at that Mexican restaurant.

Sam thinks he was.                                   

And then what if Rowena’s spell would have found Dean, if he’d taken up Death’s offer and ended up on the dark side of the moon, or wherever. Maybe then, the Darkness would have been unleashed on the moon, instead.

It’s a strange thought.

\---

**_Second_ : _a strange sense of vertigo._**

Imagine: the inside of your brain is made up of two spheres capable of gyroscopic rotation. The first is what you see exterior to you. When you’re shaken very hard, or dizzy with fever, or high on something, this first sphere rotates, and you feel the world spinning around you. Colours dazzle. Sounds become circus-artistes: leaping, jumping, soaring dizzy and thin and high.

Imagine the second sphere. When it rotates, the exterior remains immobile. Your heart keeps time, your blood sings. It’s only the inner consciousness that spins, a roulette wheel, and you cannot predict where it will stop.

You could be anything. You could do _anything._

Your default is the only mode you’re familiar with: the rest is a game of chance.

\---

They’re moving.

Sam notices them when he pauses in his research to take stock of the silence. It’s only actually been twenty minutes. Seems like forever.

He shoots Dean a message: _crazies going somewhere._

_so??? May b found new prey???_

_Feel different,_ types Sam.

He backspaces.

 _Looks_ different.

Dean sends an emoji that either means he’s puzzled or feeling constipated.

 _don’t go lookin,_ he says _. stay put. ok, sammy?_

Sam hesitates. He waits with the cursor blinking on his phone, and it pings again ten seconds later.

_U ok?_

_Sam?_

_When did we become The Walking Dead?_ Dean says.

 _Don’t text and drive,_ Sam types.

He’s not lying. Lying by omission is still a contested form of lying.

Sam thinks of Dean in the car. The wind, the music, the familiarity of the road before him like a black tongue. It destabilizes him. He feels the vertigo leap off his spine and climb into his brain. It swaggers through his occipital, unmindful of matter standing in its way, spreads feelers across his frontal lobe. Violent lancings of pain; vehement pulsation in the carotid. The silence/noise, the light—the disquiet suffocates. Someone’s let a wood-chipper free in his head.

 _This is how forests feel about deforestation_.

Sam winces.

He can do better than _that_.

\---

Cleaving, impalement; if he bends forward too much his brains would possibly dribble out of his head, forced to find escape by the vertigo swelling in its space.

It was everywhere that he was. It was everywhere that he wasn’t.

It was everywhere and _he_ wasn’t.

The headache is _abrupt_ even though it is not, _savage_ even though it has always been.

( _and the centre can’t hold.)_

Sam slides off his ergonomic chair and sits on the floor, forehead pressed to the cold metal of the file cabinets. He thinks of what he feels about dying. He _thinks_ he feels pretty fierce about not wanting to die.

( _Turn this into a win, Sam. Come on.)_

When Sam was thirteen, he helped a hunter breed magical cocks while Dad and Dean took care of a ghost in Laramie. Magical cocks of the _cock_ and _hen_ variety, not the other kind, although Dean snickered about that for a summer or two. Melanie Reed, that hunter was called. Weird woman, had a farm out in the Oregon boonies somewhere, and Sam spent most of his summer carrying buckets and hauling mud and scattering seeds in the ground for the chicks to gobble up. He poured malted oats in dirty white cups, sneezed on straw, and made sure he didn’t mix up the males, females and the young ones in their stinking little pens. Melanie stumbled around, half-drunk, either forgetting him altogether or mistaking him for a dead younger brother, issuing strange and seemingly haphazard commands. _Tie their legs together. Bathe them in salt water—no, that’s too less salt, it has to go_ through _their skins. Don’t be too close when they crow: here, wear your earmuffs._

At night she listened to disco, loudly, as if she was trying to drown out something in her head. Sam missed Dean. He missed school. Hell, he even missed his Dad and his rock music and the occasional gruff singing when he was in a passably good mood. Sam found himself murderous towards Melanie, towards the farm, the animals in the dark roaming in circles howling at the perimeter, dying of hunger, howling and howling.

And then he had tried to get hold of a rooster, had forgotten his earmuffs, and spent the next two weeks stumbling into walls, disoriented. The headaches were brutal assaults. His reality disengaged. Time and distances felt exaggerated. Things, voices, memories—they all rolled over him, _through_ him, as if he were translucent. He tried to think of Dad and Dean and something outside of this dusty, horrible farm but found nothing in his head but lint and feathers.

The vertigo danced—land felt like water, sleep felt like drowning.

Melanie would look at him, and tut: _this is what happens when you’re raised on revenge._

There was no win there as well.

\---

(The vertigo dances.)

\---

 _On my way back,_ texts Dean. _Baby safe._

A few minutes pass. Then: _hang on, Sam._

\---

Sam lights a fire.

He figures this much: the primordial Darkness existed before there was light. Because: _let there be light,_ and all that. In his experience, shadow-monsters are mostly afraid of flame. The _daevas_ from so many years ago loathed fire. He goes looking around in the hospital and finds cotton, spirit, and a lighter in some doctor’s desk. He makes a torch, and then he stands in front of a mirror in a consulting room, trying to see if anything’s changed.

His skin crawls with the black vines. _Veins._ Whatever. In the harsh light of the flames, eyes red and skin sweaty, he looks exactly like a rabid.

He thinks of how tired he is of looking like something else.

Heat licks his face. The light of the fire washes over his skin. Distress goes galloping through his blood. (Good, that’s good.)

Sam watches for a retreat that does not happen. A disappearance of the growing black veins. Some pyrotechnics, maybe.

Nothing happens.

For a minute all he can do is drop his face into his hands and breathe. He gives himself thirty seconds. And when that’s done, he takes a deep breath and thinks of how much he hates this, how much he just wants to curl up and go to sleep and not have a time-bomb ticking over him, how much he’s tired of his shit with Dean and Dean’s shit with him, and their combined crap that keeps driving the world towards one form of the apocalypse or the other.

The motherfucking _Darkness._

He’ll find a fucking cure, or God help him.                

Outside, all the rabid are going somewhere. Sam doesn’t want to go, but there’s a pull in his blood.

Whale song.

 _Focus,_ Sam thinks. Stay focussed. Stay angry.

Sam wonders what they would have done if removing the Mark from Dean had not thrown them into some other matter of extreme urgency. If removing the Mark had only been just that, and Sam and Dean were both alive at the end of that, and it was all too good to be true but the other shoe was really _not_ dropping…what would they have done?

Sam might have worked on the books that the Stynes had doused in flammable fluid and nearly lit on fire. (He’d cleaned the floor because it seemed like a thing to do at the time: all the rage that was, mopping bloody floors while your brother tore through the world. He’d got the floor, but he hadn’t fixed the books.) Dean might have pottered around in the kitchen a while, because there was nothing quite like escaping a supernatural foxhole situation to bring back your appetite.

Or, you know, they might have skipped the bunker altogether. Taken a break. Got in the car and driven for as long and as far as they wanted, not after cases, just for the sights. Have a good time, together. It’s homesickness—or maybe _road_ sickness in their case—it grows inside, and his heart wants the road, his feet, his thoughts want the road. When he closes his eyes and thinks of peace, it’s a bend in the road he sees, a subtle turn. An invitation.

When Sam said _how did we forget to do this_ he kinda already knew the answer.

They had to stop. They had to breathe. They couldn’t keep jumping from one sinking ship to another, and just hope that one day they’ll land on the ground, by a beach, for a pretty sunset and cocktails by the sea.

Losing the Mark couldn’t be as easy as shucking off a Halloween costume; Sam needed whole days to hover, be attentive the only way he knew (even if he sucked at it), for Dean to get pissed at him and then resigned, for Sam to watch established patterns fall into place and established quirks to return. Sam needed whole days to just _be;_ to pretend like he knew what he was doing in the kitchen, to read a book, to shoot the shit with Dean. They needed snow days, one after the other, a whole volley of them. And he had to figure what to do about Rowena, but he’d let that wait. He’d let them catch their breath, and find their feet, and find something to hold onto that’s a little more than a fraying straw. He really just wants his brother.

Instead, they had this.

His head whirls. Explosive pain beneath his eyelids. Nausea rushes up in him like a tidal wave.

His phone chirps.

\---

_Sam, talk to me._

_Sam?_

_What are you doing? Sammy?_

\---

Whole place is on fire when Sam wakes up.

He must have lost consciousness. Can’t have been more than five minutes. He sits up, feels the spot on his side where he hit the edge of a table falling down. It hurts like a bitch. Add that to the ever-increasing catalogue of his bruises.

And the whole room is on fire. Great idea, that torch. What was the probability of messing up with that and burning himself to a crisp, again?

The doorknob’s heating up, but not hot enough to cause Sam trouble when he turns it. He stumbles out, coughing. He hasn’t timed the other infected people, but he thinks he has maybe an hour. Two, max.

The last time Sam actually counted down hours until probable death, he was in Detroit and the Devil was loose.

(He should call Dean now.)

It’s on his way back to the reception that Sam catches sight of himself reflected on the window.

\---

Somewhere in his head, Sam has a dusty dream of retiring.

 _The job’s never over,_ they say. It’s like when Charlie and him and Dean watched _Game of Thrones,_ and Charlie leaned over and said, _you guys are like the Night’s Watch_.

It was kind of true: they watched out for the things in the dark, and protected people from them. They watched until death. Except, when hunters died, there was rarely anyone to stand around their corpse and say _and now his watch has ended._ You’d be lucky if you got a funeral. Lucky if someone even noticed you were dead, in the first place.

(And Sam’s decided, without having realized it himself, that he doesn’t want to die like that. They’ve tried it. It hasn’t stuck. And the glory part of it? That’s a lie. You either die alone with no one else the wiser for what glorious act led to your death. Or, with some luck, you leave behind _I’_ someone who’s a) fucking pissed off, b) plain sad that you’ve passed on.

No one thinks of _glory._ Nobody’s happy _._

Sam’s seenHeaven _(As A Series of Doors)_ through his eyes and through the eyes of beings significantly older and better-versed with that realm, and he doesn’t think he ever came across anything that looked remotely like Valhalla, that strange heaven of eternal booze and eternal glory.

And so, in short: nobody gains anything from dying a glorious death _._ )

They’ll stop, Sam thinks. Somehow or the other, somewhere or the other, they’ll draw a line and they’ll stop. Him and Dean both. And they will die _well._ As well as people who have killed Death can hope to die.

**\---**

**_Third: a calling._ **

Think of how whales must feel about SONAR leaks. This otherworldly, up-spectral voice bounding in leaps and waves in the ocean, transverse and perverse in a way only man can be, intruding beneath the sea.

Think of how it might be if they thought the voice was calling them to something—far away, beautiful—does whale-faith even have the concept of salvation? If so, salvation.

Think of what it might mean to find out that it’s just a dinky bit of engineering sending spasms of expansions and compressions in the hope that something bounces back.

There’s no light at the end of the tunnel. There’s only an obstruction for the waves to bounce off.

But think: the whales don’t know that.

\---

 _I’m almost there,_ Dean says over the phone. _You hold on, Sam, okay? Don’t do anything._

And this is exactly what Sam didn’t want him to do, in the first place. He can’t raze through an entire minefield to save one fucking canary. He’ll blow up everything.

(And he’s not sure _holding on_ is in the cards, anyway. Somewhere out there in the dark, there is a congregation. Attendance is mandatory.)

\---

The Faith of The Darkness is a strange thing.

It needs no demarcated time of the day, no festival, no _muezzin_ on a rooftop to call its faithful to pray.

It whispers, and the faithful hear.

It whispers, and the faithful gather.

They have no church, no temple. The night is their temple, its mysteries their scripture.

They take offerings: boxes of Kleenex, chairs, light bulbs, crowbars, televisions. Somebody brings a car door. Wood from the timber mill nearby; books from a library. By the time Sam comes up to their makeshift cathedral, it’s as tall and as haphazard as the Carhenge. Except, you know, it’s a tower—not a _henge,_ of any sort. In the dark, it rises to the sky with a terrible, twisted beauty. Sam’s eyes adjust and he sees that the cathedral is not random, not a heap of junk just pushed together. It has levels. There are metal levels, and wooden levels, and glass levels.

There is love in this thing; adoration.

The streetlights are out, the d(D?)arkness absolute. The moon’s light is cold and copperish, from behind clouds.

The rabid stand in a loose circle around the tower.

The rabid are un-rabid when there is nothing to attack. They are peaceful. They look deceivingly human—almost, save for the blue-black on their skin like someone’s pumped their blood full of indigo dye. There is no crooning, no flailing—the Church of the Darkness demands neither ululations nor words. The faithful stand looking lost, and sad, waiting for something. Somebody comes forward to drop something at the base of the cathedral. A photo. A graduation certificate. The very base of the tower fills up with these things: personal knick-knacks, tiny stories. Things to hold onto, but given up for a purpose that’s more than human.

A glass frame falls from the tower of junk and shatters. Glass rebounds as high as Sam’s eye-level.

They look at him.

It’s time to make his offering.

## \---

Thousands and thousands of years ago, before man invented fire, the night was equated to the world before God. It creeped over the early blue corn, the vale and the rocks and the mountains, and brought with it the terror of the unseen. It was visceral, universal; _to be afraid of the dark_ was a line coded into the collective universal consciousness before there ever _was_ a universal consciousness.

Day meant light. Day meant safety.

The dark only meant fear and death.

And then flint struck and sparks flew. Kindling coughed, smoked, flamed. Or maybe Prometheus did his thing and stole it from Heaven and flew down on his magic horse, whatever, but fire mimicked day, and suddenly, the dark could be kept at bay.

Not destroyed; not overcome. Simply: at bay.

\---

Sam douses what he can reach with lighter fluid.

He hopes there’s enough stuff in the tower that will catch flame.

He strikes a match.

\---

The rabid don’t scatter. Maybe they’re too slow for it, he doesn’t know.

The cathedral goes up in flames and the architects watch.

In time, they drop to their knees in the suffocating heat and thick smoke. They cry, horrible black tears. They lose their edges—or maybe Sam’s just imagining that—they become _small_ somehow. Like they’re fragile.

He hides at the back, near a park bench, afraid they’ll turn on him. There are too many of them if they do, and not enough ammunition in Sam’s duffel.

 _WTF? Fire?_ types Dean. He’s a few hours away, stopping for gas, and then getting back as quick as he can, he promises. Again. It’s like he’s trying to overcompensate for all the near-fratricide.

Sam guesses he’s not going to die in the next hour, after all. He rubs his eyes.

 _For now,_ types Sam. He has a feeling this won’t last.

There’s a whole new world out there for the Darkness to explore. She probably doesn’t even know what cheeseburgers are, yet.

\---

Eventually, Sam thinks a woman in a black dress comes to sit next to him.

He can’t be sure. She’s a flicker at the edge of his vision, a mirage that might disappear if you look too long. And _don’t look too long at anything you don’t think is real_ is a bit of Dean wisdom from, oh, back in 2011.

The fire throws glimmers of light on her face. She clasps her hands together on her lap, and lifts her face to the heat.

Her eyes shine slick like gemstones.

\---

 


End file.
